A Cowrie of Hope

by Binwell Sinyangwe

I got really involved in Nasula's heartbreaking struggle to raise money for her much-loved daughter's education and desperately wanted her to succeed. The brilliant descriptions of hardship give you an in-depth understanding of the effects of poverty on individuals in developing countries, and the struggle to sell a bag of beans takes on an epic quality.

Extract

Nasula was poverty, she was loneliness and aloneness. Suffering was her life. She wore it like her own skin. A young peasant woman in her early thirties, beautiful and gracefully built, Nasula had no means and no dependable support. She was the gods' plant growing on poor soils without tendrils.